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OPINION

Why I can't bring myself to mourn Billy Graham

Emily Mills
Published 1:56 p.m. CT March 2, 2018

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The Rev. Billy Graham was famous as the minister to presidents from Harry Truman to Barack Obama. But biographer Grant Wacker says the North Carolina preacher would have been leery or too close an association with the current occupant of the White House. (Feb. 21)
AP

The Rev. Billy Graham disparaged Jews in a conversation Feb. 1, 1972, with President Nixon that was captured on White House recordings. Graham apologized 30 years later when the tapes were made public after denying in 1994 what he had said. The cartoonist's homepage, citizen-times.com/voices-views(Photo11: David Cohen, Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times)

I got into a spat the other day over the legacy of Billy Graham, the evangelical pastor who died last month. Someone took issue with my lack of deference to the man’s life and legacy, specifically for my calling out the pain he caused by demonizing LGBTQ people and those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

I’m not into spitting on graves, but there are people I do not grieve, and I don’t wish to see people with toxic legacies turned into saints after they die. Let's turn our attention to people who are truly doing good — and the work they’re doing, often without much funding or support.

It’s true that Graham was one of the first white evangelicals to insist upon integrating his services back in the 1950s, even inviting a young Martin Luther King Jr. to say prayers at one of the events. But Graham would go on to deny an invitation to join the March on Washington, claiming he didn’t want to get involved in politics. He dismissed King’s famous “I Have A Dream Speech” and criticized the nonviolent direct action movement for civil rights.

Graham was a showman, more concerned with popularity and “saving souls” than much else. He was a warmonger, backing Presidents Johnson and Nixon and their war in Vietnam, and maybe an anti-Semite. And Graham was most certainly a homophobe, musing (and later apologizing) that AIDS was a punishment sent by God. His advice to a young woman who wrote him seeking counsel over her same-sex attraction was unequivocal: “We traffic in homosexuality at the peril of our spiritual welfare,” he wrote. “Your affection for another of your own sex is misdirected, and you will be judged by God's holy standards.”

When Graham belittled King’s moving speech that dreamt of a “Beloved Community” here on Earth, he said, “Only when Christ comes again will the little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with little black children.”

In other words, Graham believed (and preached) that only the apocalypse, and the promised life after death, would bring about equality and justice. He was content to spend his life preaching hellfire in order to scare people into his version of Christianity. He profited handsomely from it.

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I’m far more interested in the work that can be done in the here and now to improve people’s lives. I would rather focus on the people who see value in seeking a more just and equitable world and avoiding apocalypse (and the inevitable suffering that it would cause for the vast majority of the living) altogether.

Religion can be a balm, a cudgel, a call to action, or all three. Like any tool, it can be also be used as a weapon. It can drive people to do amazing or terrible things.

I am grateful to have been raised by parents who took their Christianity and used it as a way to build positive community and to attempt to improve the lives of others. My father, a Presbyterian minister all his life, taught me to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” They taught me about a loving God, not a vengeful and threatening patriarch, and that I should strive to do good for goodness sake.

I wish their voices were louder, but it’s inherent in the more humble work they do that they don’t seek the limelight, or the megachurch, or the private ear of presidents. Sometimes they aren’t religious at all.

We must seek them out and elevate those more loving and humane missions. They know that welcoming and striving for the good of all people — without judgment of their sexual orientation or gender identity, without disdain for their history or culture or language, without thought to force anyone else to believe the same way they do — is a crucial part of the work to build a truly Beloved Community.